Disadvantaged Majorities

Summary Ibsen provides a slogan for all elitist groups, especially suitable for the computer-wise, “The minority is always right”. He also claimed that the majority has the might, but we have found little sign of any majority flexing of muscles in relation to IT. Earlier pages have noted those who constitute the computer-wise — young, male, from industrialized countries, able to handle the English/American language, often with high enough material wealth to have a computing capacity at home, often also self-taught but increasingly a product of modern Western education. It would be harsh to describe them as arrogant, though arrogance is a characteristic of many of their attitudes. Certainly they have and use a specialist jargon, inventing new terms for the new technologies, speaking and writing in initials and acronyms, and making little attempt to explain themselves to the rest of us. They are a new priesthood, without the traditional fancy dress, but with all the rituals and mysticism, and the expectation that we followers will have faith in them. If we are to have faith, and if that faith is to be justified, then we will need growing evidence of a sensitive ministry to two significant population groups. This chapter will focus on those two large groups of people, majorities in a global sense, who are currently largely outside the brotherhood of IT. One group is made up of poor people, excluded because of their poverty, their consequent lack of education, and, for many of them, their political powerlessness within their societies. This is not a difficult group to place as IT-outcasts, because of the lack of material wealth which puts computers, telephones and the like in the luxury category. They exist within industrialized countries and are the societies of the Third World. The second group is less easily explained because there are no blatantly obvious reasons why IT has become such a male dominated scene, and so effectively kept women out. It would be simplistic to focus on gender relations in IT as no more than a continuation of traditional subjugation, though this is clearly an element. Whether in the broad framework of political, social, legal and religious systems, or in the narrower confines of applied sciences, male dominance is well entrenched. It is hardly a surprise, in a setting where the thrill of inventiveness has overwhelmed all other considerations, to find both the unchallenged assumption that IT systems designed by men should serve to perpetuate male control, and the sort of flippantly patronising attitudes handed down by Dr. Johnson when he described women preaching as “like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.” As a conclusion to the chapter we look at some “What if …” scenarios, particularly seeking to trace the way IT might look it, instead of being developed in a wealthy industrial country, it bad taken its values and structures from a different kind of society, based on poor rural communities.